The Girl on the Corner
by SnapdragonSmile
Summary: Perhaps there was another Lyra. OneShot.


Lily Black never forgot the day she saw the girl. Oh, she doubted the girl saw her. She was concentrating on something, standing with some boy, intense, strong, and his eyes darting round. Lily was eleven then, leaning out her bedroom window, reaching for the same branch she always grasped onto to climb the oak outside her window.

She couldn't figure out just what stopped her. Her fingers were brushed her edge of the oak, ready to swing her legs over onto the branch as she had a thousand times before. Some sort of voice inside her (Lily had a particularly chatty Little Voice, always telling her to "Do this" or "Don't do that", though she rarely listened to it) told her to look down.

There, below her, waiting on a street corner for the light to change, her mouth moving rapidly, was the girl.

We could be twins, she remembers thinking.

They were small and blonde and skinny, with wide, pale blue eyes and sunburnt skin. They had the same scrapes, bruises and insect-bite scars on their legs, which Lily had earned from games of Red Rover (strong, fast and wiry, she always won), climbing trees and roofs and from falling when she raced Roger Parslow, who was her summer and week-end friend, since he went to the local comprehensive and she'd been sent by her father to public school.

The girl's hair was longer and dirtier, her eyes warier. Lily refused to wear anything but jeans and this girl wore a strange, stiff plaid skirt. Her eyes went to her pocket now and then, her lips moving, or she would clasp her bag closer.

Lily couldn't look away from her. The light changed and she saw that the girl walked as she did, rushing forward with an occasional half-skip, she pushed her hair behind her ears in the same way, she twisted her mouth into the same grimace. Lily told herself it was only her imagination but somehow, though she wasn't sure how or why, she knew it wasn't, as surely as she knew needles could prick her or freedom was good.

Lily stood and she watched, positioning herself so that she knew the girl couldn't see her. The girl walked by and in a minute, she was gone.

Lily told the nanny about it that night. She had been thinking about the girl all day and though she was a good secret-keeper when she wanted to be and the Little Voice was screaming at her to be quiet, she could think of no real reason not to tell. Besides, thoughts of the girl had been burning in her all day.

The nanny listened, wide-eyed but also with a certain air of indulgence Lily could always recognize.

"Well, isn't that something, dear?" she said, her tone a little forced.

"I did see it!" Lily insisted hotly, for she knew that the staff was wary of her lies, ever since she had convinced several of them that Roger had been taken by a strange man in dark glasses, only to have a panicked search party retrieve a perfectly safe Roger who had been swinging on the swings at the neighborhood park and remembered no such man.

"Of course you did, Lily." The nanny smiled and placed a kiss on Lily's forehead.

"I'll call my father and ask him about it. He'll believe it. Or I'll ask Mum next time she comes. She'd know, I bet."

"I suppose they might." The nanny smiled and brushed a curl from Lily's face, thinking of the stories in the papers about Lily's parents and their behavior when she'd met them and how unlikely it was for either to listen to the girl's imaginings.

"Do you think I have a twin, maybe?" Lily asked, though that same odd, sure feeling was telling her it was something else entirely.

"Maybe," the nanny replied, playing along.

"Like when Mum was in hospital the nurses made a mistake and gave my twin to another family and she's been living in Oxford all this and I never knew. Or maybe Mum decided she didn't want two babies so she gave my sister up for adoption and we never got told, neither of us? Or she ran away when I was too little to remember and nobody wanted to make me sad by telling me about my lost twin sister but they sent out searches and she was never found so they assumed she'd die or been kidnapped or---"

"Time to calm down, Lily," the nanny commanded, "If you get too excited you'll never get to sleep."

Lily pulled a face but the nanny, unremitting, shut the door, sighing. Lily began by thinking, trying to put the pieces together. Perhaps her father or her mother had another secret daughter they'd never told her about. If it was her father's, perhaps he didn't even know! After all, Lily was by no means naive and while her knowledge of such things was a jumble of fact and rumor, she did know the basic ideas.

She fell asleep thinking of her secret sister, taken away at birth, kept from both her father and herself. Maybe they would find each other again. Perhaps she could move in. Lily would show her how to climb the oak tree outside her window, she would show her the creaky floorboard under which she kept her treasures (letters from her father, her mother's old, empty perfume bottle, a knotted stick which she had decided was a witch's wand and a decoder ring which was the prize in a cereal box), they would push each other on the swings in the local park.

"Don't be ridiculous. Of course I don't have another daughter. Where did you get an idea like that?" James Black scoffed.

Lily was beginning to regret the decision to ask her father about the girl. She wanted to be like him, always but still he frightened her, intimidated her.

"Are you sure? Maybe you don't know, see? Maybe her mother never told you."

"I am entirely certain that you are my only daughter. Besides, you said she was your age."

"Around my age. Maybe a little older or younger."

"I was married to your mother at the time she would have been born."

Lily thought of saying this proved absolutely nothing but decided it would be best not to.

"Well, she looked like me, see. Exactly like me. Maybe she's my twin! Maybe she got given to another family on accident and---"

"Your mother had scans when she was pregnant with you and if you were twins, I'm fairly certain she would have mentioned it. What you saw was probably a coincidence, your imagination. Now, we are finished with this frankly ridiculous conversation. I don't want to hear about lost twins and unknown illegitimate children, I want to see your marks. Are you still behind in maths?"

And that was that.

As her father left for another meeting with the Russian Ambassador or the South African President or the Minister of International Affairs or somebody else very important Lily did not know or care about, she mentioned the girl again.

"I think I'll ask what Mum thinks about her when she comes. Maybe she'd know. She's coming next week-end, right?"

As soon as she said, Lily knew she'd made a mistake. James' expression darkened and his movements became quicker and sharper, as though he longed to strike someone.

"I suppose she is," James spat, "though I doubt she'd know any more about the figments of your imagination than I do."

Lily didn't fully understand why, if her father didn't want her mother to visit her, he didn't simply stop her from coming. Lily had never known anyone to disobey James Black. He could simply tell her nanny or the housekeeper not to let her in. She'd heard him muttering once about "damn divorce court" and "shared custody" and all sorts of other nonsense words.

When Lily was seven, she'd asked the housekeeper about her parents and why they acted so strangely. After all, the parents of the children she played with weren't like them. They weren't like the silly couples on television with their sweet words and drawn-out kisses but they'd peck each other on the cheek and eat dinner together.

The housekeeper had been uncomfortable, unsure what to say or do. She'd read the story in the papers, of course, overheard conversations, and seen most of it, having worked in the house for years. She'd never had orders not to tell. And didn't the girl have a right to know about her own parents?

"You see, when your dad met your mum, she was already married to someone else."

Lily's eyes widened. She'd never heard this.

"She was the wife of a Tory MP, that's Member of Parliament, in case you didn't know, and he was old enough to be her father. She'd been married to him about a year when she met James and as the story goes, they fell in love. About four months after that, your mother went to her husband and told him she wanted a divorce. He was shocked. He hadn't thought there was anything wrong with them. But she insisted and she usually got what she wanted. It caused a lot of talk, since her husband was trying for the Tory nomination in the next Prime Minister election. It hurt him in the election, too. Who would vote for a man who couldn't control his own wife, let alone Britain? And almost as soon as the divorce was finalized, she got married to your dad, small registry office wedding, not the big Diana affair she had with her first husband and six months later, you were born."

Lily thought she remembered hearing something at school about it taking nine months to have a baby but she decided she must have been wrong. She'd have to ask Roger, though she doubted he'd know. Somehow, she knew it was probably a bad idea to ask her mother.

"Yeah? Then?" Lily asked.

"Well, then, I'm not sure, exactly. You remember the next years, don't you?" The housekeeper was beginning to get the irksome feeling she was gossiping about her employers, rather than telling her charge important information about her parents.

Lily nodded, dubious.

"Well, they were married five years. And then, I suppose some people aren't good at living together. Too intense, maybe. They just aren't suited."

And that was the end of it.

Lily's mother took her out to perfumed shops, gave her expensive presents, kissed her good-night. She had a special bedroom in her flat for Lily, which she could decorate whichever way she liked. The room had seen everything from some rather lurid dinosaur posters to a painted-on map of the world to the same silky, pretty wallpaper that covered the rest of the flat.

And just the same, her mother scared her. She'd fly into funny rages, her eyes blazing and cold all at once. She was different at parties, her voice all sweet and fascinated and her eyes like painted-on, mesmerized circles. But then, oh then she'd kiss Lily goodnight and sing her the same songs she used to when Lily was a baby. And her mother would say she loved her and somehow Lily knew she meant it.

Sometimes her mother would drop her off when her father was home from one of his trips. The two of them would go into one of the many empty rooms, closing the door. Lily would hear shouts and crashes that sounded like broken glass.

Sometimes she made out words and phrases.

Social-climber. Gold-digger. Coulter. Lily. Why? Hate. Power-hungry. Irresponsible. Radical. Tory.

But once as her mother left Lily found her by the door, kissing her father, her fingers knotted in his hair, his hands circled round her waist. For a moment Lily thought her mother would move back in and her father wouldn't go away so often and maybe she could stay home and see Roger every day and go to the local comprehensive instead of her mother's old girl's school.

"I can't," her mother had said, breaking away.

"You can," her father replied, "Margaux, you know you can."

He kissed her again and Lily sat there, feeling she should look away from this distinctly adult affair but staying. Her mother pulled herself away, spinning her head round when she saw Lily. She looked weak, dizzy, placing a hand on the wall to steady herself. Her father did not move, unapologetic.

"It's time for you to leave, Lily. I'll speak to you later," he commanded.

So she obeyed.

And when Lily was fifteen and her father died of a presumed heart attack at some political dinner in Russia (but there was white powder stuck to the bottom of his glass and the government never allowed an autopsy), Margaux had clutched Lily's arm as though she thought she would fall and cried ugly tears, real ones that stained her face red and turned her beautiful eyes into little clouded slits.

And as she left, she'd whispered in Lily's ear.

"I love you, Lily. I do. I know I haven't got much that's good to say for myself but I love you so much. So very much."

And Margaux Black waved goodbye. Lily never saw that part of her, the part that cried tears that weren't for the papers or admitted her nature, again.

Lily wasn't one to dwell but she did think of the girl now and then. She'd stay in her thoughts for a moment, perhaps just before falling asleep or when she was walking to class. She'd see a flash of blond hair or see a rushing, bouncing walk and turn her eyes to look for the girl, even when she'd later convinced herself it had to have been her imagination.

But then she'd think of something else and promptly forget it.

When she was twenty, she saw the boy again. She was attending Oxford, Exeter College to be precise, walking to her next lecture, when her book bag split, her disorganized papers spilling all over the path. The boy had wordlessly helped pick up the ones that fell near his feet. When he brought them to her, she recognized him at once.

So she hadn't been dreaming.

His eyes went very hard and intense, his face paler. He looked disbelieving, pained. His expression reminded Lily of something, of someone. Something she had read, she knew that. What was it?

Oh, yes. Tantalus.

Tantalus from the myth who was neck deep in water that disappeared when he tried to drink, who had fruit dangling in front of him that vanished when he tried to pick it. And yet he tried and tried and tried again.

"Thank you," Lily rasped, shivering a little, "I'm Lily Black."

Why did she introduce herself to a stranger who'd helped her with her papers? For some reason, she thought she should. She thought it seemed right.

"You're welcome. I'm Will Parry."

He asked her for coffee. Out of some sort of attraction or pity or curiosity, she accepted. He was quiet, attentive. Lily had always been a talker and she rambled on about all sorts of things to fill the silence. He'd asked all the usual questions. What was she reading (Literature) where did she live (in the dormitories) did she like Oxford (more than anything). She asked the same questions and he gave her short answers, his mind clearly elsewhere.

He seemed to be constantly looking for something in her, searching her face with a bitter, hopeful sadness. She wondered if it had anything to do with the girl. Perhaps she'd died. Lily longed to ask and she wanted to ask about how he'd lost his two fingers and she wanted to ask what he wanted her to be like.

But she knew she couldn't.

Sometimes he'd twist his lips into a sad little smile, like when she said she wanted to be a novelist because she loved more than anything to invent and that she'd been quite the liar as a child. Or when she said she couldn't cook, that she burned everything that she touched. Or when she said she loved the cinema as much as anything, that getting caught up in the pictures and story had never stopped impressing her.

He'd walked her to the dormitory and he'd kissed her. It was a short, expert, hard kiss and Lily swore she'd never seen anyone look sadder.

Will gave her his phone number but she never called him. There was something about him she felt she couldn't understand, that she couldn't touch. She didn't like the way he looked at her, like he wanted to recognize something or someone in her and was just slightly disappointed. And Lily hated how sad she seemed to make him. He never seemed more pained than when he looked at her.

And life went on, busy and rushed, happy and tiring and disappointing. The years passed. Lily wrote books, some good and some horrendous, some published and some put away for the waste bin eternally. She married, had children, traveled, and worked. Her mother died driving to a political cocktail, her car found a wreck on the side of a road. Lily even spoke to Roger now and then, sharing old stories and laughing at each other and themselves.

She always had plenty to think about.

Still, now and then, she would be just falling asleep or waking up, walking someplace or eating in a cafe, when she'd think of the girl just for second and of the pained boy with the missing fingers.

And then the thought would be gone.


End file.
